The Master Algorithm Quotes

“Another line of argument for the unity of the cortex comes from what might be called the poverty of the genome. The number of connections in your brain is over a million times the number of letters in your genome, so it’s not physically possible for the genome to specify in detail how the brain is wired.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“parents. Some networks are so dense with arrows that when we print them, the page turns solid black. (The physicist Mark Newman calls them “ridiculograms.”)”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The Bible Code, a 1998 bestseller, claimed that the bible contains predictions on the future events that you can find by skipping letters at regular intervals an assembling words from the letter you land on. Unfortunately, there are so many ways to do this that you're guaranteed to find "predictions" in any sufficiently long text.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Because of its origins and guiding principles, symbolist machine learning is still closer to the rest of AI than the other schools. If computer science were a continent, symbolist learning would share a long border with knowledge engineering. Knowledge is traded in both directions— manually entered knowledge for use in learners, induced knowledge for addition to knowledge bases— but at the end of the day the rationalist-empiricist fault line runs right down that border, and crossing it is not easy.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The deeper problem, however, is that most learners start out knowing too little, and no amount of knob-twiddling will get them to the finish line.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Most learners have a knob you can turn to make them more or less flexible, such as the threshold for significance tests or the penalty on the size of the model. Tweaking that knob is your first resort.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Significance tests are the gold standard for deciding whether a research result is publishable, but if several teams look for an effect and only one finds it, chances are it didn’t, even though you’d never guess that from reading their solid-looking paper.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“It’s even been said that data mining means “torturing the data until it confesses.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The rationalist likes to plan everything in advance before making the first move. The empiricist prefers to try things and see how they turn out. I don’t know if there’s a gene for rationalism or one for empiricism, but looking at my computer scientist colleagues, I’ve observed time and again that they are almost like personality traits: some people are rationalistic to the core and could never have been otherwise; and others are empiricist through and through, and that’s what they’ll always be. The two sides can converse with each other and sometimes draw on each other’s results, but they can understand each other only so much. Deep down each believes that what the other does is secondary, and not very interesting.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“The Master Algorithm is for induction, the process of learning, what the Turing machine is for deduction.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“Tom Mitchell, a leading symbolist, calls it “the futility of bias-free learning.” In ordinary life, bias is a pejorative word: preconceived notions are bad. But in machine learning, preconceived notions are indispensable; you can’t learn without them. In fact, preconceived notions are also indispensable to human cognition, but they’re hardwired into the brain, and we take them for granted. It’s biases over and beyond those that are questionable.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

“machine-learning algorithms, also known as learners, are different: they figure it out on their own, by making inferences from data. And the more data they have, the better they get. Now we don’t have to program computers; they program themselves.”
― Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World